Google Launches Asia Pacific Zone for Cloud Platform

Google is hoping to gain more traction in the Asia Pacific market with the launch of a new zone for Google Cloud Platform, as well as Compute Engine zones in the region.

Google already has Cloud Platform and Compute Engine customers in the Asia Pacific region, but the company looks as though it's hoping to boost its presence and win over new customers and developers. Google launched new zones in Asia Pacific.

Howard Wu, head of Asia Pacific Marketing for Google Cloud Platform, announced the launch of Cloud Platform and Compute Engine in his region on the Google Cloud Platform blog. The launch follows on recent success Google has had with customers and developers in the region, including mobile gaming provider Applibot and online content tagging startup Tagtoo.

"Now, more developers in Asia Pacific can experience the speed and scale of Google's infrastructure with the expansion of support for Cloud Platform. Today we switched on support for Compute Engine zones in Asia Pacific, as well as deploying Cloud Storage and Cloud SQL," Wu wrote.

The region also is being outfitted with Google Andromeda, the company's network virtualization stack, for faster networking performance, as well as transparent maintenance with live migration and automatic restart for Compute Engine.

Google Cloud Platform also has been localized to some extent, providing Japanese and Traditional Chinese on its website and in the developer console.

It's a huge step for Google in the Asia Pacific market. It doesn't mean access to Google Cloud Platform and Google Compute Engine for companies in Asia, but it also means a significant step toward other markets, including Australia, noted by Google's Brett Morgan in the blog's comments.

Missing from the announcement is the exact location of the data center—kind of an important thing for those hoping for the fastest connection speeds. Google already has data centers in Taiwan and Singapore.

The big cloud platform providers are all slowly building out their support in the Asia Pacific realm. Amazon Web Services has data centers in Japan, Singapore and Australia, but it has plans to open a data center in Beijing, as well. Microsoft Azure has also stepped into the Asia Pacific market by opening a data center in China earlier this year.

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